Five minutes into “Rabbit Hole,” when I realized what the film is about, I was ready to put my fist through the screen. My mood deteriorated from there.
Maybe you like dead-kid movies. I don’t.
Actually, I’m understating the facts. This is a double dead-kid movie, a story of dead kids being handed down the generations like anti-heirlooms. A clipped, tough and disarmingly frank Nicole Kidman plays Becca, a grieving Queens mother of a 4-year-old boy who (the movie thinks it’s being clever by withholding the details for a long while) was run over in the street by a luckless but sensitive teen (an adept Miles Teller).
Becca and her husband Howie (Aaron Eckhart) have different coping strategies, and we are presented with a dozen or so examples of each, in case we miss the point: She wants to expunge traces of the dead kid. He clings to every souvenir, even keeping the car seat ready in the back seat and hungrily watching a video of his son every night.
Strong performances and sympathetic direction by John Cameron Mitchell (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) cannot conceal the inertia of the story and the irrelevance of its title metaphor. The teen driver has been creating a lovely comic book called “Rabbit Hole” in which a broken family gets reunited in one of an infinity of parallel universes. In the money scene, Becca finds comfort in the comics: “This is just the sad version of us. But there’s other versions!”
OK! Except that earlier in the movie, Becca blares her disdain when another grief-torn mother opines that God took her son because He needed another angel. He’s God, Becca shouts in the other woman’s face: He could have just cooked himself up another angel.
That Becca (and, perhaps, the smug urbanites at whom the movie is aimed) considers religious faith to be absurd but takes comfort in comic books yields the only interesting, if unintended, point. The bristlingly secular have a remarkable tendency to simply push their hope chips to some other ridiculous bet. That Becca is increasing the world’s sum total of misery by attacking the other mom’s notions doesn’t occur to her.
Kidman and Eckhart simmer until they get to explode in big contrived movie-ish ways: She slaps a woman in a supermarket in a quarrel that begins when Becca tells the woman to give her kid a treat. He shows prospective home buyers his son’s still-decorated room, and babbles that he sometimes thinks the kid is just hiding there somewhere. Sure. Who doesn’t want to buy a haunted house?
Mitchell and writer David Lindsay-Abaire, who won a Pulitzer for the stage version of this soggy and false awards-grubbing piece, can’t stop themselves from adding another layer to the tragi-cake: Is Becca’s mother (Dianne Wiest) entitled to be equally sad at the loss of her 30-year-old boy to drugs? Not omitted is a slo-mo flashback scene of Kidman dashing horror-stricken toward her son’s broken body.
“Rabbit Hole” reeks with a seedy, exploitative quality — the equivalent of the cancer tourist played by Helena Bonham Carter in “Fight Club.” Though it’s more restrained and less corny than two dead-kid movies from early this year, “Remember Me” and “The Greatest,” it doesn’t penetrate into human nature, locate catharsis or investigate either healing or despair. It contains no poetry. It simply conjures up a horrible feeling — and then sits back awaiting congratulation.